The present invention relates to a printer control apparatus which has a figure image generating means for generating a figure image in accordance with parameters of figure data and which is used in a printer for developing print image data in a line buffer in units of lines and printing out the print image.
In a conventional processing apparatus dealing with characters and figures such as a wordprocessor, when character and figure images are printed by a printer or the like, these print images are developed in a page memory in units of pages and are sequentially read out in synchronism with the print operation and printed by the printer. However, since such a print control means stores image data in units of pages, a large-capacity page memory is required, resulting in high cost. In order to solve this problem, a conventional apparatus is known wherein figure data is given by parameters and, figure images are developed into the line buffer. However, according to this apparatus, character and figure images are independently developed into the line buffer at different line print timings. Because of this, a single line is scanned twice, and therefore, it takes a long print time to complete printing of all the pages.
Furthermore, the conventional apparatus is arranged such that parameters of figure data are written in a specific memory area (a parameter area) in units of pages, and the parameters corresponding to the line positions are sequentially read out in synchronism with the print operation, thereby generating the figure image.
With this arrangement, when the number of figures to be printed on one page is not specified, a large memory area must be assigned as the parameter area. On the other hand, when the storage capacity of the parameter area is limited, the number of figures to be printed on one page is also limited.